October 16
POPULATION CONTROL DAY
If you think that Planned Parenthood and other such organizations are unique to today’s society, think again.
Long before most of us were born, three women, Margaret Sanger, Fania Mindell and Ethel Burne, all from New York, decided that the poor should have some help in controlling the size of their families. They felt they could help if they opened a birth control clinic because “no social progress is possible, especially where poverty is a factor, unless the size of families is limited.” Talk about being way ahead of your time...
They opened the doors of the first such clinic in the United States, right smack in the middle of Brooklyn at 46 Amboy Street on this day in 1916. Ms. Sanger served 30 days in jail for her bold action. A year earlier she had been indicted for using the U.S. mail to disseminate birth control information in three languages throughout the United States.
A public nurse, Margaret Sanger went on to become the first president of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation in 1953.
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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